--On Sunday, October 17, 2021 15:52 -0400 Russ Housley <housley@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > >> On Oct 17, 2021, at 8:54 AM, Carsten Bormann <cabo@xxxxxxx> >> wrote: >> >> On 2021-10-17, at 14:47, John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx> >> wrote: >>> >>> FWIW, I have no idea whether permission was obtained to >>> extract and reproduce material from X3.4-1968 to act as the >>> basis for RFC 20 or whether the conclusion at the time was >>> that it was not necessary. >> >> (Random fuzzy recollection: I seem to remember that what made >> me start campaigning for RFC 20 to be a STD was that I wanted >> to stop people from referencing X3.4 just in order to avoid a >> downref.) >> >> We should do this more often. > > Wouldn't it have been trivial to add RFC 20 to the downref > registry? Of course, there is no need to do it now that it is > a standard. > > 0020 ASCII format for network interchange. V.G. Cerf. October > 1969. (Format: TXT, PDF, HTML) (Also STD0080) (Status: > INTERNET STANDARD) (DOI: 10.17487/RFC0020) Carsten's memory is almost certainly better than mine, but I think we may have moved it to full standard, probably given its age from "UNKNOWN" long before the downref registry was an established practice. Also, from my perspective, we shouldn't be making decisions like that on the basis of what might or might not be trivial. Or, from a different perspective, reclassifying it to Internet Standard more accurately reflects the status of ASCII on the Internet and should have been equally trivial: I can't imagine anyone being about to make a serious claim either that it has not been implemented, that it is not widely deployed, or that there have been any issues with interoperability (except with things that don't claim to be ASCII). I actually think that suggests something that should probably be considered for BCP97bis: that the downref procedure and registry should be used only when there are substantive reasons why the relevant document cannot be upgraded or that doing so would require an unreasonable amount of effort. That would strengthen the text that now appears in the last paragraphs of Murray's Sections 4.2 and 5 but even the current text suggests to me that "trivial" is not a good enough reason for the use of that registry. I also just noticed that the draft does not appear to describe the contents and format of that registry, what entity is responsible for keeping it, and where. Especially if we take the position that, once something is in that registry, no special procedures (or different procedures) need be followed to use the reference in another document, the registry should record why downref permission was granted, in which the document's categories the reference falls, and any additional explanation that seems necessary -- that information should not just be in the Last Call. My instinct tells me that the RFC Editor Function should be responsible for the registry itself, but that might raise issues I have not thought of yet. best, john john